Adam was a pretty cheesy idea for a character, but Hertzberg really knocked it out of the park. Joss has always had a knack for getting multi-layered performances out of people in roles that could have been either dreadfully campy or thuggishly one-note. The Master, Luke, Adam, Groo, Jayne. As much as people hammer Joss with the "why the strong women" cliche, the "why the complex musclemen" is just as much a hallmark of his writing.

Holly Valance as Buffy? Could work. Make no mistake, I am a huge huge fan of SMG but Buffy is a character that should live on and have a number of different actors portray her. It's happened already. And Ms. Valance looks like she could do the character proud.

For the record: Growing up a teenage boy in the 90's in Australia - Holly Valance was pretty much the most desirable thing that existed in the whole world. 'Flick' from Neighbours was pretty much the bomb.

Heh, that's the great thing about 'Neighbours', you can age people by their crush (more a '[not so] Plain Jane, Superbrain' fan myself. And Natalie Imbruglia, obviously ;).

I liked 'Taken' well enough but it's a pretty one note, one layer, one for the boys type of 'ubermensch' action movie. Liam Neeson brings what he can to the role though and he's a pretty believable bad-ass mofo (proving, as always, that it's not in the muscles, it's in the eyes). I just wanted it to ask a few more questions about the value of a man like that to society (and initially at least, it seemed all set to since we see him pretty much floundering at the start of the film, out of his element).

Jayne's Hat: I haven't seen the film myself but I remember it getting extremely mixed reviews in the UK. Even the positive ones mentioned that the ending was apparently preposterous. Here's a very positive review by William Leith in The Guardian, but in the same paper Xan Brooks pretty much dismissed it as repulsive. To quote another reviewer:

It's quick, lean and very mean but with its all-American paranoia, it might have been written by Sarah Palin, or Kyle's Mom from South Park, which amounts to the same thing.

Many reviewers said that the stereotypes of Europeans drifted between the risible and the downright offensive, in fact I heard Liam Neeson being interviewed when he was promoting the film and he pretty much admitted that he thought the same thing but then dismissed it with a strange giggle.

[ETA -- I know that the film was a largely European production, BTW. I guess that that on its own doesn't necessarily preclude it containing offensive stereotypes of Europeans.]

Beren77: you don't have to be Australian or a teenager to think that Flick was the bomb!

Oh sure, politically it sits just to the right of Genghis Khan and without spoiling (more than the trailer shows) you could read it as justifying a sort of American isolationism/suspicion of European liberalism but then a lot of/most action movies have a right-ish feel to them IMO (I know it's not a clear cut right/left issue but you don't see many action movies with a pro gun-control message for instance ;).

And the fact that it's largely a European production makes me think they were just creating a particular (in some ways quite old fashioned) kind of action hero rather than making a political statement. Neeson's character is basically Arnie in 'Commando' masquerading as e.g. Jason Bourne or the new [to films] James Bond, he's an unstoppable, unapologetic, unreflective killing machine pretending to be a realistically vulnerable man.

That's what I mean by one note/layer though in that the baddies are (usually) so bad and the stakes so high that the hero is never not justified in what he does (or at least, his actions are never questioned by the film when in at least one scene they most assuredly should be IMO).

I liked the extended trailer a lot, which was emailed to me from some studio list I'm on. It probably made the movie seem a lot more interesting than some of the opinions above. As far as there being many Buffy's, and since I would think we'd want Joss to be the one doing Buffy projects, my take is she's not an interchangeable-actor character like Bond is.